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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Cyril Connolly

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Cyril Connolly
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 10
Died: 1974
Died: November 26
Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Cyril Vernon Connolly
Cannot
Classes
Leisure
Member
Members
Pay
Class
Artist
Art
Leisured

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Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
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No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
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Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril Connolly
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If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
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We fear something before we hate.
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly
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The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Cyril Connolly
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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
Cyril Connolly
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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly